The goal of the NDA

The goal of the National Digital Data Archive (NDDA) is to foster comprehensive (preferably multilingual) accessibility, presence and utility of public content in Hungarian language or showing a Hungarian relevance in the international virtual space.

Some internet search engines offer full text searches on documents available on-line, others recommend sites on the basis of the meta-information in the headers of the webpages. NDDA has a new approach for this aspect.
It allows structured searchability, opening the way to semantisation. With it, database content becomes searchable, as opposed to just static pages or websites directly accessible through an URL. It conducts searches in descriptions made by experts on that particular subject, instead of searching inside the digital objects.
The information detected by the search engine serves as an instant cadastre. A data asset map of domestic digital contents can be prepared any time. This cadastre function makes ongoing work in different workshops transparent to the outside world, making parallel digitization avoidable.
NDDA also contributes to the freedom of information principle coming true.

The NDDA places emphasis on the importance of self-organisation and of co-operation among communities, individuals and institutions as the historically unique and significant feature of the network medium, and undertakes to centrally support and thus encourage it to be a movement from the ground up.
NDDA hopes that the number of those – not just institutions, but individuals too – who come forth voluntarily to share the digital contents in their possession through NDDA will keep growing.
Besides cultural contents NDDA is open to other directions too. It is engaged in collecting state administration and commercial data assets, all set to make different scientific achievements, outputs from tenders, studies, market research results available.
The program does not discriminate among contents intended for disclosure. Within the bounds of certain legal and basic moral principles, NDDA is open to provide searchability for contents of unusual or „outside the sublime culture” nature.

The functional model of NDDA is based on a principle offering a novel dissemination method, which was developed by an international scientific community. The essence of the so called Open Archive Initiative (OAI) model is separating data provider and service provider roles.
Data providers preserve digital contents, document, i.e. digital objects as well as generate and maintain information describing these. Data providers retain handling and full control of content.
According to the model, the content’s descriptory information shall be disclosed to the public. Service providers build value-added services on this basis.
If operation is smooth while roles and functions are separated (operated by independent parties), then it really is an open archive architecture.

The worldwide renowned and recognized initiative, called Dublin Core (DC) is an important component of the OAI model: it is the semantic standard for data exchange among digital archives.
The DC standard is fit for creating the minimum consensus necessary for implementing data exchange between different sorts of archives, thus between data providers and service providers. In most cases, however, it is not suited for completely describing archive content and satisfying modeling and functional requisites of content providers.
In conformity with OAI recommendations, NDDA implemented the Dublin Core element set to be the standard for data exchange between archives. In order to adapt to domestic needs as closely as possible, we have extended and supplemented this standard.
Dublin Core supplemented with classes enables the creation of thorough and expert descriptions to audiovisual items, films, bibliographies, images and datasets.
It is the data provider’s duty to annotate his archive’s contents with meta-data complying with the above standard. The scope of expenditures for newly joining partners depends on the extent and quality of the information created beforehand, describing the contents stored in his archive in his registry.
NDDA supplies data providers with different applications for the conversion. The NDDA system – using the OAI servers provided free of charge - automatically collects (“harvests”) generated meta-data, constantly expanding and updating the range of available contents.
Owing to the international nature of the standard, the contents annotated with DC compliant meta-data become searchable not only for the NDDA search engine, but for other international search engines too – making Hungarian culture and contents in Hungarian recognisable and available on a larger scale.